Not Worth It
Remember all the promises we heard way back in the heady days of 2000, when certain politicians insisted that it was all onward and upward, if only you put them in charge? Slash taxes across the board—but mostly for corporations and the very wealthy—deregulate the financial industry while the benevolent hand of the free market nudges them into wise and ethical fiscal policy, do away with pesky environmental regulation, and we’ll all be rich, rich, rich! So how’s that going for you? Feeling rich yet? Feeling like your life is worth a lot more than it was before the neocons were in charge?
I ask because those same guys with the promises to make the pie higher have decided that your life is not worth as much as it was eight years ago. Take careful note, because this is an official evaluation, an estimate produced by the EPA. Where the value of a human life lay somewhere in the neighborhood of $8 million in 1996, it is now officially just under $7 million—and that valuation ignores inflation, including the sharp devaluation of the dollar which has accompanied the fiscal policies of the same yahoos described above. Measured against the more stable euro, the value of life has dropped from E7 million to just E4.3 million, a drop of over 38%.
The EPA valuation of human life is measured rather arbitrarily, according to an arcane and elaborate formula of how much extra money a worker can command for an increase in risk at the workplace—according to basic economic theory, the real valuation of workplace health risks. You may not consider it a particularly meaningful measurement of the value of a human life. The EPA claims to agree, insisting that people shouldn’t think of the number as a price tag on a life.
Unfortunately, that is precisely how other federal departments, including the EPA itself, think of it. It’s just that admitting as much would seem…tacky. The valuation is used to determine whether enforcement of health and safety regulations are worth the cost: multiply number of lives saved by the value of each life, and compare it to the cost of enforcement. If the price tag exceeds the value of the actual humans involved, to hell with them. The lower the value of your life, the less likely the law is to be enforced, which in turn lowers the value of your life even further.
And that explains why our current executive and his cronies, with a long track record of redefining such indicators as unemployment, inflation, or cost of living to make itself look good would be so eager to announce that your life is officially worth 12% less than it was before they took office—and unofficially, but more accurately, a whopping 38% less. Being able to claim they’ve improved your life would be flattering, but claiming they’ve ruined it is actually worth cold, hard cash. Between satisfying corporate greed and mere image, there’s no contest.
Your actual well-being of course, doesn’t even enter that particular calculation.